You might be accustomed to seeing the comics of Matt Furie and Lisa Hanawalt in avant-garde anthologies like Kramers Ergot and Thickness, or in their solo humor series from Pigeon Press Boy’s Club and I Want You, or in the stylishly sleazy pages of Vice magazine. But now you can share your love of these modern masters of anthropomorphic mayhem with your little ones!

Publishing | DC Comics will allocate the second printing of Justice League #1, with retailers receiving 32 percent of their orders, which now won’t ship until Sept. 21, the same day the third printing will be released. ICv2 reports some stores are concerned that potential new readers drawn in by the publisher’s promotional campaign for the New 52 won’t understand the two-week wait to pick up a copy of the comic. The website also runs down the list of cable television shows during which DC’s New 52 commercial is airing. [ICv2.com]

Passings | Comic Art Community reports that artist Dave Hoover passed away earlier this week. Hoover, who drew runs of Captain America and Starman in the 1990s, more recently worked on Zenescope’s Charmed comic. Before working in comics, Hoover was an animator, working on Flash Gordon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, The Super Friends, The Smurfs and many more in the 1970s and 1980s. [Comic Art Community]

If you’ve seen Jordan Crane’s elegant webcomics hub What Things Do — or better still, if you’re one of the lucky few who have a copy of his hand-silkscreened, die-cut, three-books-in-one anthology NON #5 — you know that the cartoonist behind Uptight and The Clouds Above is one of comics’ best designers. But I think that with Keep Our Secrets, his new comics-style children’s book for McSweeney’s kids’ imprint McMullens, the man has truly outdone himself. This sucker is partially printed in heat-sensitive, color-changing black ink that disappears when touched to reveal a picture hidden underneath. Check it out in the video above, as two adorable tykes help demonstrate. If I were a little kid, I think being able to touch a book and suddenly see hidden stuff appear — like an accordion stuffed with cats, say, or a guy with banana hands under his gloves — would be something close to magic.

Disney Publishing Worldwide will be in San Diego next weekend to unveil Marvel Press, a new line of children’s books based in the Marvel Universe. It looks like these will not be comics but “picture books, chapter books, novels, and storybooks”—there’s a bit of redundancy in that statement. The line will be featured in the Disney/Marvel Team Up panel at 3 p.m. on Sunday, with Marvel and Disney editors showing off their Marvel Origin Storybooks line. (The Disney press release makes this sound like breaking news, but the first three books are already available in stores.)

Disney will also be showing off their Disney Comics iOS app and they will have heaps of plain ol’ books at their booth (#1016), including limited quantities of upcoming releases. There will be giveaways: Phineas and Ferb masks and magazines, Rick Riordan Heroes of Olympus pens, and more. Filmmaker and author Don Hahn will be giving a panel on “Why We Create” and also signing copies of Brain Storm and The Alchemy Animation, and illustrator Joey Chou will also be there to sign his picture book It’s a Small World.

Ralph Cosentino is in a fairly unique position when it comes to getting superheroes.

An extremely gifted artist and children’s picture book author, Cosentino has been tasked with telling the stories of several DC superheroes via picture books, which means Cosentino is a) Reclaiming the characters for the audience they were originally created for, b) simplifying their stories down to their most essential aspects in order to fit them into about 32 pages (or the equivalent of thirty-some panels) and c) streamlining them to make them as appealing as possible to an audience unfamiliar with their comics.

Of course, while the children’s story book and comic book have a lot in common, they’re not exactly equivalent, and Cosentino’s work faces some demands that the original, Golden Age comic books did not, including making these characters and their first stories beautiful enough and satisfying enough that they earn their permanent, expensive ($16) format.

Cosentino started this series with 2008’s Batman: The Story of The Dark Knight (which I discussed at some length on my home blog, here), and continued it last year with 2010’s Superman: The Story of The Man of Steel. I was particularly excited to check out his new book, Wonder Woman: The Story of the Amazon Princess, since the character seems like such a difficult one to get…at least judging by the property’s permanent residence in Hollywood development hell, the recently passed-over David E. Kelly TV pilot and DC’s now seemingly annual reboots of the comics character.

Welcome to a long holiday weekend (at least here in the United States) edition of What Are You Reading? Today our special guest is Doug Zawisza, who writes reviews and the occasional article for Comic Book Resources.

Retailing | Troubles continue for Borders Group as the retailer filed notice Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Executive Vice President Thomas D. Carney and Chief Information Officer D. Scott Laverty have resigned. Just last week Borders, the country’s second-largest bookstore chain, announced it’s delaying payments to some publishers as it attempts to restructure its credit lines. [GalleyCat]

Libraries | Four of the top five young-adult titles checked out from the New York Public Library in 2010 were manga: Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto, Tite Kubo’s Bleach, Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, and Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball Z. Jennifer Holm’s graphic novel Babymouse and Jeff Kinney’s comics-prose hybrid Diary of a Wimpy Kid were the top two children’s titles. [NYPL Wire]

A few days ago I posted a teaser for a new Cullen Bunn project coming from Evileye … and now Cullen has revealed more details about it on his blog. Crooked Hills is a new series of prose books for kids that “blends mystery and adventure to weave a fun an unforgettable story of will, friendship and family bonds,” according to the press release.

“Crooked Hills, Missouri, is a combination of many of the small towns in which I grew up,” Bunn said, “from Newton Grove, North Carolina, to Thayer, Missouri. (Thayer in particular helped to form a template for Crooked Hills.) Those towns were rich with interesting people and even more interesting urban legends and ghost stories. With CROOKED HILLS, I imagined sitting in the heart of a dark forest around a campfire, telling kids those kinds of spine-tingling ghost stories. So it seemed to me that having a witch come back to life to kidnap kids and be eaten by a hell hound would scare the living daylights out of almost anybody. But in that nightmare, I also saw a chance to explore what happens when kids face their fears; to overcome them can be incredibly liberating and empowering.”

And as someone pointed out in the comments section of the teaser image, the promo artwork is indeed by Bunn’s The Sixth Gun co-conspirator Brain Hurtt.

Passings | Writer Peter O’Donnell, creator of the Modesty Blaise comic strip, died May 3 at age 90. Steve Holland notes that although the prolific novelist suffered from Parkinson’s disease, he “kept in touch with fans and continued to pen introductions for Titan’s Modesty reprints.”

Born in south London on April 11, 1920, O’Donnell wrote such adventure strips as the long-running adaptation of the James Bond novel Dr. No, Garth, and Romeo Brown before being asked in 1962 to create a new character for the Daily Express. He came up with Modesty Blaise, whose catsuit-wearing heroine fought villainy with the help of her right-hand man Willie Garvin. The strip was quickly picked up by the Evening Standard, and ran from May 1963 to July 2002.

O’Donnell also wrote a series of Modesty Blaise novels and, under the pen name of Madeleine Brent, several historical romances. [Bleeding Cool, Guardian, Times Online]

Conventions | The inaugural Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo drew an estimated 27,500 unique attendees, slightly less than the 30,000 expected. “We felt it was an excellent launch,” Lance Fensterman, Reed Exhibitions vice president, told ICv2.com. “For the last year this show has been a theory. For the last three days people have been able to walk around and experience what the event, the concept, and the community are about, and now we can grow from here.” Christopher Borelli, Brent DiCrescenzo and Heidi MacDonald file wrap-ups from the show. [C2E2]

Publishing | According to ICv2’s annual white paper, presented during the Diamond Retailer Summit at C2E2, sales of comics and graphic novels in the United States and Canada fell 5 percent last year as the total market declined from an estimated $715 million in 2008 to $680 million in 2009. In the book channel, manga sales dropped by more than 20 percent, while sales of kids and young-adult graphic novels jumped by more than 50 percent. [ICv2.com]

Peter Richardson discusses why World War I did not capture creators’ imaginations the way other wars have, and he accompanies his discussion with a beautiful counterexample, a sample from Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches, upcoming from Fantagraphics next month. (via Journalista)

Craig Fischer has a decidedly mixed review of The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion, but then halfway through he goes roaring off into a digression on one of Hal Foster’s possible influences, Olive Beaupre Miller’s series of children’s books titled My Bookhouse. For good measure, someone just sent Ben Towle a set. (I had these as a kid, and they are lovely.) For more about Foster, see Ng Suat Tong’s recent post at The Hooded Utilitarian.

Tom Crippen, who is no Sarah Palin fan, cries foul nonetheless on Oliphant’s cartoon showing her postcoital encounter with a moose, pointing out that it probably reveals more about Oliphant than Palin.

Vom Marlowe reviews vol. 1 of Song of the Hanging Sky, a lovely manga with a quirky plot and a few perplexing translation problems.Brian Heater thinks Jason’s Almost Silent is a good choice for graphic novel newbies.

Is the El Nino winter getting you down? Cheer up my friend, I’ve got just the thing. Namely, another round of What Are You Reading. I bet you’re feeling better already.

Our special guest this week is the lovely and talented Nina Stone, wife of Tucker Stone, who can frequently be found dipping her toe into the comical book waters over at The Factual Opinion, via her regular weekly column Romancing the Stone (formerly known as the Virgin Read).

To find out what Nina and the rest of the R6 crew is reading, click on the link below. But first, put on a sweater. You look cold.

Artist Steven Anderson depicts characters from Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass in the style of children’s book illustrator Roger Hargreaves (author of the Mr. Men and Little Miss series). Anderson’s Flickr account features similar takes on Red Mist, Wolverine, The Hulk, Nick Fury and numerous other comic-book characters.

Arriving on your virtual driveway like a big, thick newspaper (remember those?) it’s time once again for What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is Deb Aoki, who runs the excellent Manga About.com site, which, if you have any interest at all in Japanese comics, you really should have that site bookmarked and/or in your RSS feed.

I’m abstaining from participating in this week’s WAYR, as a nasty cold has made it difficult to form coherent sentences. But Deb and the rest of the Robot 6 crew have a veritable boatload of interesting comics to talk about, so be sure to click on the link and see read their comments. Oh, and be sure to share with us what you’re reading in the comments section, OK?

This isn’t exactly comics, but it’s pretty cool so I’m posting it here anyway. Using classic Japanese monster movie posters as his guide, children’s book illustrator Dan Santat turned out a really rocking cover for his latest project Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World). He blogs about putting the whole thing together here,

The best part? The cover folds out to become a poster kids can hang on their wall. (via)